Why I'm a Pirate

by tbassetto • 15 years ago

857 513 15 years ago

The ultimate response to those who try to legislate against piracy for years has been to point out that there is no paid service which is as convenient as other unpaid, illegal ones (bittorrent or usenet, for instance). This is just one of the few unfortunate times where it makes fiscal sense for corporations to try to change the laws rather than innovate.

They might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate.

I own Blu-rays that have anti-piracy ads that I can't skip through before I watch the movie. That alone shows how screwed up this situation is.

rmc2• 15 years ago

They might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate.

Heheh, and yet The Pirate Bay (and lots of others), have a single site with lots of things. It might be a nightmare, but not only can it exist, but it does exist.

I am always amazed that the pirate/P2P swarm essentially distributes thousands and thousands of films/tv shows/music for free. Distribution is now free! You don't need to pay to copy your bits! Your users will do it for you, for free!

tjogin2• 15 years ago

The problem of music piracy is mostly solved, largely because of iPod/iTunes and Spotify and others. And it was, indeed, solved by making the legal services as good or better as the illegal ones. Sure there are some music piracy left, but only a fraction of the piracy during the Napster heydays.

The problem that does persist (if it's a problem at all) is that the perceived value of recorded music has dropped, other forms of entertainment has taken the crown. The nineties are over, and it's not coming back, sadly the record industry thinks it's still possible.

jonhendry• 15 years ago

"Your users will do it for you, for free!"

They don't need users, they need customers. Without customers you go out of business, even if you have a zillion users.

yason• 15 years ago

I'm pretty much down to the same conclusion, personally.

I'd happily pay a recurrent, if modest, sum of money for the ability to legally and easily download not only newer but, more importantly, older and more obscure movies and television series to my computer in the form of convenient unencumbered .avi|.mkv|.mp4 files, from a catalog whose selection and quality matches the level of service of the 2010's.

If MAFIAA offered that, with a credible promise that the material will be there ten years from now, I would not only pay for the content but not bother to stash a single file onto my external hard disk. Because of the high level of sophistication when it comes to the selection, quality, and availability of the content it would be far more convenient to just pay again to redownload what I want to see again.

Pay-per-view is exactly what the studios are dreaming of but it's not going to happen through restrictions, but through unrivalled convenience only.

zerostar07• 15 years ago

At some point, someone has to devise a purely-virtual solution: You should be able to buy 'virtual tickets' that give you the right to download a movie from anywhere you want. People making use of music in their videos would be required to have a link to buy the ticket. I think the idea of charging for "digital copies" doesn't make sense anymore, because it has zero scarcity, same goes with "digital performance"

TamDenholm• 15 years ago

I used to be this guy, i would pirate software, music, tv shows, films, games etc. I did it mainly because it was easy. Innovation has changed my ways, not completely, but mostly.

I no longer pirate music, ive paid for spotify for over 2 years now, i get music wherever i want on any device and its great, i wish they had metallica and acdc but theres youtube for that.

I no longer pirate software, linux got good at "just working" and i've been using ubuntu for years now. I use google docs and other SaaS apps and pay for really good apps like dropbox.

I no longer pirate games, mainly because i'm not much of a gamer, but i have paid for some indie games like SPAZ, Minecraft, QUBE, Darwinia etc because they're indie and the money goes to the developer and the price point is much more reasonable than the big games that come with heavily restrictive DRM.

I still download TV Shows, but not as much as i used to because of BBC iPlayer and similar initiatives, its mainly American TV i download, i've actually no idea if this is illegal or not, considering most of the shows are put on the american networks websites for streaming too.

For films there are LoveFilm, Netflix (now in the UK), iPlayer does some films now as does youtube, but i still think films are the category that is lacking the most, but also a really tough nut to crack, but hell, if it can be done with music, it can be done with films.

So, in my opinion, innovation and me feeling good about giving money to actual people rather than conglomerates is what has stopped me from pirating as much as i used to and thats the key.

rplnt• 15 years ago

I no longer pirate software because I can live with free software or if I really need/want something I guess I could just pay for it. I no longer pirate games because I don't play that much and if I do I mostly play games that are "free to play". Several times a year I buy a "serious" game on steam because it is so easy.

However I still do pirate movies because they are extremely expensive and I know of no way how to watch them online for smaller prices. I still pirate TV shows because there is no way I could watch them otherwise (that I know of at least). Music, well.. much less than I used to.

Luckily it is not illegal to download a movie or a song, but it is still not right. I guess.

rythie2• 15 years ago

Plus, you can even get unlimited cinema passes (in the U.K. at least):

http://www.cineworld.co.uk/unlimited

andrewingram• 15 years ago

Interestingly, I still pirate shows that are available on iPlayer. Simply because the iPlayer experience is inferior to pirating it. Why? Well, let's see...

* iPlayer runs through Flash, it has to because of DRM (the iPhone version gets around this I think). I use a relatively recent Macbook Pro and the playback performance is dreadful. Even on my beasty iMac the HD versions of shows were stuttery at best, so I was forced to use the SD version. Normally I'm quite happy downloading and watching an SD broadcast of a show in full-screen, but in iPlayer the quality of the upscaling is so bad that it's distracting.

* Shows are quite often available on torrent sites before they're available through iPlayer (discounting watching content as it airs), this is especially true of HD content.

* Despite living in London, my internet connection simply isn't reliable enough to handle streaming without occasional buffering, even with SD. So my preferred approach is to download a show rather than stream it. I've generally found that downloading into iPlayer Desktop is slower than using a torrent site. As well as the fact that VLC doesn't eat my CPU like Adobe Air does.

By comparison, I'm a happy customer of Spotify, and I'm more than happy to pay for a video equivalent. I've tried Netflix now that it's out here, but the Silverlight player is as bad as Flash when it comes to CPU usage. The quality of the Netflix streams is pretty poor too, I've yet to manage to get it enable streaming in HD.

asb• 15 years ago

Check out get_iplayer http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html and play the downloaded flv in VLC.

junto3• 15 years ago

The regional licensing is the biggest barrier in my opinion. Germany is even worse than the UK and access to English speaking media is very difficult here. There are no legal outlets.

Frustratingly I would happily pay to access US and UK TV shows in the same way that I pay for music via Spotify, but the media companies aren't interested in taking my money. They are too busy trying to sue us and censor the internet instead.

BBC iPlayer Global is a joke. I have to navigate the Germany Apple Store (in German), sign up for a German iTunes account and my UK issued credit card is refused, even though the billing address held with the credit card company is correctly registered to my German address.

US internet companies struggle with the concepts of locale, language and applicable regional law. The whole issue is complex and nobody gets it right. It is often forgotten that where someone lives is not directly related to the language they speak (or preferred language). I find legally binding terms and conditions hard enough to understand in English, let alone in German. Legally, that is still my problem. Should it be? Do I need to see ads in German Google? Accept Language anyone??? http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...

parbo• 15 years ago

Sounds exactly like me, except for the movie part. None of the service that are available in Sweden have a large enough selection.

citricsquid2• 15 years ago

This is such bullshit, I really wish I could downvote this sort of post.

If you don't agree with the methods used by companies to sell their products DON'T then take it anyway, you're showing people WANT the product but aren't willing to pay, so what's the best solution? Make it harder to pirate / try to block pirating.

This guy and everyone else who refuses to just not consume media they can't get on terms they and the companies agree with are the reason we have all this SOPA crap.

If the latest Rihanna album is $10 and you're only willing to pay $1 instead of then pirating DON'T get it, just ignore it, if everyone did this we'd have no problems, then media companies would either adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong, they wouldn't then fight the internet.

This guy and everyone else who follows the same point of view is essentially trying to blackmail media companies, how about instead you just move on. You have no right to the media they produce and if you're unhappy with what they want for it MOVE ON. If Sony want to sell the latest album from band x for $1,000 that's their choice, you have no right to that album.

omouse2• 15 years ago

You have no right to the media they produce

They have no right to force everyone else to conform to absurd rules made to preserve their profits.

citricsquid2• 15 years ago

That's an entirely different issue and not a counter point to what I'm saying.

VMG• 15 years ago

Do they force you? Do you have to buy a Rihanna album?

drewblaisdell3• 15 years ago

When I started making enough money to buy everything I was consuming, I put an end to my piracy habit for some time. I had Netflix, used Rhapsody (then Spotify), bought season passes on iTunes (I used iPlayer a couple times but being in the US I had to use Tor to get around the region filter to watch a Louis Theroux documentaries, I guess that's "piracy").

I stopped when I realized that while I could afford it, all of these services were inferior to the ones I was used to. I will gladly pay for a product that is better than its free counterpart. I will even pay for a product that I could pirate, but I will not pay more to watch ads and listen to music on only a limited number of DRM-supported devices.

tintin2• 15 years ago

When I started making enough money to buy a car I put an end to my car stealing habit for some time.

See how silly this sounds?

The problem with digital media is that it's very easy to copy. You can't just copy a car.

There are tons of website offering free music. So just support those artists instead of the ones charging too much for an inferior service.

WA• 15 years ago

I was in the movie theatre three weeks ago and paid almost 10€ for the ticket only to be forced to watch - I kid you not - 30 minutes of commercials + another 20 minutes of movie trailers before the movie even started. And when you reserve a ticket, you are forced to be there 30 minutes before the movie begins, otherwise they released the seats.

That was a waste of 50+30 minutes of my time, which was more than half of the entire movie. And I even paid 10 freaking bucks for it.

This was the moment when I realized that I probably won't go to a movie theater more than once a year from now on.

This doesn't mean that I now will go on and pirate the movie. There's still iTunes and I don't need to see a movie on release day, but it was a great example for how companies mess up the user experience.

The irony is that some theaters show something like a self-commercial with the saying "Cinema - that's what movies are made for".

Disclaimer: This happened in Germany. The movie-watching experience in the US was way better to me. No commercials, only a few trailers.

patd• 15 years ago

I believe ploum still lives in France and in France when you buy a usb sticks, blank CDs and hard drives, you have to pay a "private copy tax" that can be in the tens of euros.

So even if he ignores it, he is still paying them money because media companies can't adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong.

tomp7• 15 years ago

So, does this tax then mean that I can pirate songs/movies? After all, I have already paid for them (through the tax).

(Fiction, I know, but one can dream...)

frobozz• 15 years ago

I feel that these taxes worsen the problem. If, every time I bought blank media, the record companies got a cut, then you bet I'd not buy any music, but copy it instead. I would see it as a right that I had paid for.

catwell2• 15 years ago

I think he is from Belgium, not France.

csomar• 15 years ago

This is such bullshit, I really wish I could downvote this sort of post.

No. Upvote and explain why the author is wrong. We need to educate more people about piracy and intellectual property.

dorian-graph2• 15 years ago

I agree with you so much. To this person and all the others you don't have some God given right to the content they produce/deliver. Instead of pirating go without.

Will life stop if you don't watch the latest episode of Community? Probably. Give it a go. If you die I have dibs on your $2000 Macbook Pro, $800 iPhone, $250 Sennheiser headphones, etc. The very phrase 'Because you are messing with my life' in this context shows how much is wrong with the current culture.

These companies are destroying civilisation? I've asked this question before: If I create a piece of software and ask you to not use it without purchasing it, will you do that? Very few people seem to be able to answer yes. The people who can't answer yes are those who are ruining civilisation. There is so much hyperbole in this article ("Messing with my life was not enough. You are even trying to destroy one of the pillar of our society: education.") I'm not quite sure if it's satirical or not, hah.

Steve Jobs mentioned that in the end it comes down to the person knowing they've done something wrong after they've tried to rationalise their way out of it ("BUT IT'S NOT STEALING" or whatever the latest fad is).

During high school I pirated a hell of a lot of software, videogames, music, movies—everything. I still bought more video games than most people will in their life times but that in no way balances what I pirated. I've stopped (All I have left is to make a list of the music I have and listen to in order to delete it all and slowly purchase it, which I've started doing). I either pay for something, borrow it or go without.

The funny thing is, I don't like these big corporations either. I wish people would stop treating them as large, mythical and faceless entities but talk to the people behind the door. Until both sides come to understand each other and seek that communication they [we] will forever be at war.

I don't support SOPA nor do I support blatant pirates.

ThomPete40• 15 years ago

And the artists don't have a god given right to produce it once and sell it many times.

pingswept3• 15 years ago

I agree with your sentiment, but it seems you have a contradiction here: " (All I have left is to make a list of the music I have and listen to in order to delete it all and slowly purchase it, which I've started doing). I either pay for something, borrow it or go without."

If you really believe what you say, you'd delete all your pirated music right now. Either that, or you might modify your views a bit.

skrebbel• 15 years ago

> This is such bullshit, I really wish I could downvote this sort of post.

Don't forget that people might upvote a post not because they agree, but because they're interested in the discussion that follows. At least, it's why I upvoted the post. I hadn't completely made up my mind and arguments like yours convinced me.

ThomPete40• 15 years ago

This argument could obviously easily be reversed.

If Rihanna and others don't want their music to be pirated they shouldn't make it digital.

It is not a naturally given right you know to create an album once and then sell it in millions. It's an opportunity.

jiggy201128• 15 years ago

It's not a right to make millions it's a right to make... whatever you make.

Rihanna could release her music on vinyl only but it would still be recorded and converted to an MP3 and up on torrents in a matter of hours, digital has nothing to do with it.

The business model they would probably switch to in the case of no copyright would be to distribute a small amount of the music for free but if you want to hear the rest you have to attend a live concert where you would be searched for recording devices on entry.

Would you prefer that model?

ul5255• 15 years ago

Good point. It is strange to read how people try to justify copying music/movies/... if they never had the intention to buy it in the first place. I do have sympathy for to circumvent DRM, ... e.g. to watch a DVD of region x (which I bought) on a player of region y. I don't have any sympathy for people who steal while I pay for the same thing.

Wab• 15 years ago

Yeah and you know, so what? Let's all stop caring!

Tycho3• 15 years ago

Piracy is dishonourable... That's all the reason anyone should need for not doing it.

dchest3• 15 years ago

Sure, attacking ships is bad. Sharing, on the other hand, is honorable.

Tycho3• 15 years ago

Sharing an original work against the express wishes of the creator? Nope, you are dishonouring their hard work in creating the content and their intentions in making it available to the public.

I supposes breaching the terms of the GPL would be 'honourable' too.

omouse2• 15 years ago

Pirating is basically how a world without "intellectual property" and copyright would be like and it this world is fucking awesome.

gavinballard5• 15 years ago

This is a series of pretty poor arguments. The author seems to be looking for reasons to justify their own piracy and conflates anger at the approach of the "copyright industry" with infringement upon peoples' rights. One of the final lines of the article, in particular, is jarring:

"If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off."

It's fine to be angry about the approach large copyright holders take to piracy - suing consumers, encouraging the extradition of 23 year old UK citizens for linking, throwing cash at politicians to try to push through obscene laws like SOPA/PIPA. I'm angry about it. It's a horribly reactive, staid approach to a changing world that just isn't going to net them any long-term profitability.

What's not fine is in your mind elevating your piracy to the level of a significant political protest. It might make you feel better about it, but it really doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.

ZeroGravitas3• 15 years ago

I wasn't particularly impressed with the quality of the arguments either. On the other hand I don't see much hope of change unless 'piracy' becomes even more commonplace than it already is.

So while I personally would rather do without (similar to using Linux/Gimp vs pirating Windows/Photoshop etc.) and think that piracy in many ways strengthens the hand of the copyright owners by suffocating legitimate alternatives (again see Linux/Gimp vs pirated XP/Photoshop) I think that encouraging and legitimizing widespread piracy could well be the only "significant political protest" with any chance to succeed.

Riots and revolutions tend to happen in the summer, maybe copyright will only change if some people get to watch Transformers for free. I can live with that.

Tichy2• 15 years ago

"with infringement upon peoples' rights"

People's rights are man made, so they are debatable.

gavinballard5• 15 years ago

That's one of my problems with his argument. The author seems to think he has a fundamental right to access the produce of media companies... but only on terms he finds reasonable, of course.

As you say, rights are often malleable - and reevaluating and redefining them (from both sides of this debate) should be an ongoing process.

fauigerzigerk4• 15 years ago

Absolutely, but the counter argument is that the conclusion of that debate is expressed by the law, which is supposed to be the will of the people.

You could of course make the case that our democracy is too imperfect to accept the letter of any particular law as a direct expression of the will of the people without applying your further judgement.

Laws can be inconsistent, unjust or inappropriately applied and that's why we have the courts to make those judgements. Unfortunately, access to the courts is very unequal, particularly in the case of civil law. It's always been like this, hence breaking the law has always been the poor man's expensive lawyer and lobbyist at the same time.

Of course this argument could be used as a blanket excuse for breaking any law. Personal judgement just can't be replaced by any system.

cturner13• 15 years ago

    > It might make you feel better about it, but it really
    > doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something
    > of value

Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).

tomp7• 15 years ago

> Copyright infringement is not stealing.

I assume there will be counter-arguments/downvotes, so to elaborate on this point using my own arguments:

If you steal something from me, I don't have it (as in "steal a car"), so you're putting me in a worse-off position. If you copy/pirate something that is mine (properly copy, with attribution, and not out of context), I am not worse-off (possibly even better-off, as I get more widely known, more famous).

Some compare pirating a DVD with going to a masseuse/prostitute and not paying her/him afterwards. This analogy is not correct - the expectation/social contract is that I have to pay you after I receive a service, and if I don't pay you, you are worse-off because you don't have money that you would otherwise have. However, people that pirate movies/music are not automatically lost revenue - probably they would buy less than 10% (just a guess) of entertainment content that they download/consume through piracy.

fauigerzigerk4• 15 years ago

If authors aren't getting their fair share of the proceeds, wouldn't that be a perfect opportunity for a competing media company to enter the market and crush all existing publishers?

Silhouette6• 15 years ago

> Copyright infringement is not stealing.

No, it's more akin to various kinds of fraud. So that's OK then, I guess.

> Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).

That is simply nonsense. Even musicians signed to the big record labels or authors whose books are distributed by major publishers do a lot better than that if their work is a success. Artists using small-time/independent distributors can do better, and these days plenty of works are self-published and self-promoted, sending the lion's share of the profit back to the artist.

gavinballard5• 15 years ago

I agree with mgkimsal's comments above/below. Let's not muddy the debate with pedantic discussions over the definition of "stealing". You knew what I meant when I used the word.

With regard to your second point, I again argue that there needs to be a separation between the debate over how copyright holders operate and the legalities of piracy. Failure to do that means that the analysis breaks down when we're not talking about the big evil conglomerate music companies that screw artists over and everybody loves to hate. Do you feel comfortable with your assertions above if we're talking about an indie game developer, or TextMate author Allan Odgaard?

waxjar2• 15 years ago

This is something everyone that talks about this topic needs to understand. Basic economics teach us that an infinite supply comes at the price of (near) zero. The amount of music, movies, software (products) that can be distributed is only limited by technical issues, such as the amount of bandwidth and hard drive space. So naturally distributors should expect their product to have a lower price than it once had, especially when selling online.

Of course this leaves out the production costs entirely and probably a whole lot more. I'm not an economist, but I think this is a fatal flaw in the business model of most entertainment companies.

paulhauggis2• 15 years ago

It's not stealing, it's counterfeiting, which is much worse. Here is why:

When you steal a car, that one car is stolen. No big deal. If piracy goes unchecked, over time, the perceived value of that item will go down. This is because most people will quickly and easily be able to get it for free. Revenue will go down as a result of this and instead of having the loss of an individual copy of that product, the entire product line loses money. Something that just doesn't happen with physical products.

The same principal can be applied to the news: Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.

vph• 15 years ago

I don't buy this argument. Instead of buying a piece of music or a movie, you download it without paying, then you are in some small or large way, you are stealing it.

loup-vaillant3• 15 years ago

> you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.

What exactly is stolen? Certainly not the piece of music, film, or knowledge: unlike spaghetti, those are abundant, non-conflicting goods. Nor the exclusivity, for it is only destroyed. Nor secrecy or privacy, for the piece of knowledge or art is public already.

This is not theft. This is infringing a state granted monopoly. It doesn't make it a good idea, mind you. Upholding the law is generally a good idea. But unlike plain theft, it's not obviously wrong either.

gavinballard5• 15 years ago

See my comment above re: pedantic arguments about the definition of "stealing".

grellas made an excellent post the other day about the nature of physical property rights vs intangible property rights [1]. The general gist is that declaring one "fundamental" and the other "not-fundametal" is sophistry; both are considered important to society and both are and will continue to be protected by law.

In my opinion, the existence of both physical and IP property rights is a social good - it's defining the boundaries of those rights that becomes the tricky part. I don't think we're hitting the right balance worldwide at the moment, but I also don't think we should be swinging violently towards SOPA or conversely anarchy.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3463640

pingswept3• 15 years ago

"infringing a state granted monopoly" is the best description I've heard yet. Thanks for that.

ZenPsycho10• 15 years ago

Of course you're right. We should always, as proud citizens of the USA strictly adhere to the ethics our founding fathers set forth: 1. A citizen may not injure a corporation, or through inaction, cause a corporation to come to harm. 2. A citizen must obey orders given to them by a Corporation except where such orders would conflict with (1.) 3. A citizen must protect his/her own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with (1.) and (2.)

So given that, you are right, he doesn't refute (1.) (2.) or (3.) at all!

chernevik• 15 years ago

+1. Show biz may be stupid, they may offer a lousy service and an irrational business model. But it's in the nature of a right that the holder has liberty to exercise it as they choose, no matter how stupid or irresponsible that exercise may seem to others. A respect for copyright revocable at the user's convenience is no respect at all.

And yes, property is a right, one of far greater importance to political liberty than is generally allowed. And intellectual property is property. The placement of economic activity _outside_ the direct control of the state prevents the state from entirely dominating the society.

Now, SOPA is a really bad bill, because DNS filtering is a free speech nightmare. If you make me choose between speech rights and property rights, I'm taking the speech right, it's the foundation of everything else. The willingness of show biz and its lackeys to mess with speech rights demonstrates a disturbing greed and / or ignorance.

But that doesn't mean they're wrong about everything. It's a complicated world, and technology is revising the everyday realization of our rights and responsibilities. We aren't going to work our way through that with a black-and-white simplification of the debates.

Iv• 15 years ago

I am exactly in line with what the article says, except that I don't buy, neither do I downloaded music these last few years. In my case it is therefore not a rationalization for having free stuff.

I downloaded a lot when I was a student, when I began to work I decided I did not have the "I'm poor" excuse any more and I began buying CDs of bands I like. I stopped buying CDs after I got my first DRMed one. I thought "ok, this is stupid, I don't want to be part of this any more".

Only recently I have discovered the real harm that copyright laws and lobbyists are doing to the society. They are criminalising sharing. Think a bit about it. We have to stand against them. Now there are copyright restrictions on SCIENCE papers. It is effectively a danger to our society.

Here in France a law was proposed to display on CDs price tag how much the artist receives when you buy a CD. It was voted down by lobbyists' minions. That alone says a lot.

marknutter• 15 years ago

I admit it's stealing, but I don't care. I also break the speed limit - constantly. I also smoke pot from time to time. Music is so abundant and readily accessible it no longer makes sense to charge $20 per CD, let alone anything for songs that take two seconds to download. There is no way to stop pirating without either crippling or sensoring the Internet. Technology advances and industries die as a result. Instead of accepting the cold hard reality of the Internet and the ease of pirating and adjusting their business models, the major media companies are trying to reverse the wheel of time. They probably want us all using records again.

radu_floricica• 15 years ago

There's a subtle line this post is drawing: from the plain guilt of not paying the artists who created the art, to horror at realizing that if you pay them, you also give several times as much money to interest groups that go head on with your morals.

Once you realize this line exists, paying for music is no longer "the right thing to do" but an evil act, at least as evil as supporting sweat shops and Amazon deforestation.

Whether you continue to pirate music or simply stop listening to it is one's personal choice, but buying already ceased being the moral choice.

technoslut5• 15 years ago

So it is moral to rob artists of royalties of songs they made which you enjoy?

I'm willing to guarantee that most don't know the labels that most artists belong to. Some are indie and are not involved with the RIAA. Should they be punished as well?

You're not any different from from those you preach against.

matwood2• 15 years ago

I agree with you. If you want to stick it to copyright holders and the industry then don't use those materials. Don't watch movies that are produced by the MPAA and don't listen to music that's produced by the RIAA.

Pirating only gives those on the other side the impression and ammunition to say 'we are creating great things that people steal we just need to force them pay.' Not using their works at all is the only way to win.

rdtsc5• 15 years ago

> you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.

How is it stealing if they can still have that something?

You compose a song. I copy that song. You still have that song. If I'd taken away a recorder with your only master copy of it, then I would have stolen it.

HeyImAlex3• 15 years ago

>How is it stealing if they can still have that something?

Because that's not a decision you should get to make. The cost associated with creating most things isn't in raw materials alone but man hours that went in to produce it, and the author is entitled to ask for whatever they think their hard work and their end product are worth. Is the benefit of getting that product not worth the price they're asking? Here's a novel idea; you don't buy the product and don't get the benefit. It is worth the price? Then vote with your wallet and buy away. Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.

sciboy2• 15 years ago

I completely agree - technically.

If we invent a technology that allows us to read thoughts, should you be allowed to read them without the thinkers permission? The thinker still has their thoughts. What about disseminate them via torrents? Would that be "fair"? Is that the society we want?

What about monitoring conversations via surveillance means? The speakers still have their conversation. Should we be allowed to a) surveil anyone and b) distribute that surveillance digitally as the surveilled still have their conversation?

The time is close approaching where such questions will need to be asked and I see little difference between piracy of songs, movies or other artistic expression and the extraction and distribution of thoughts against the owners wishes. The only real difference is that the artists chose to let it out into the world in a way the pirate didn't like. One way was via concert/itunes/cd/dvd, another way could be a conversation with a friend. Both ways the pirate says they have the right to use it how they want - original thinker be damned.

In my view it comes down to respect. While technically it's not stealing, you're still an asshole for using others thoughts without their blessing.

I can imagine the day where someone hacks into your laptop, records you in a compromising position, shares it with the world and shrugs and says "how is it stealing if you still have that something"? I just copied your dignity.

Not all that can be stolen is a thing.

hxa72413• 15 years ago

If one rejects copyright, there is no 'stealing' of things of value, there is only copying -- since the work to produce things would be paid for through other means than restrictions.

If someone argues against copyright, you cannot defend it by invoking 'stealing'. The 'stealing' here is not removing of anything in any normal sense. It is infringement of, or disobedience of, copyright -- which of course would not exist if there were no copyright. There is no basic harm.

You might say it would be difficult to pay for production with other economic arrangements. But that is a matter of comparing economic efficiency; it has nothing to do with stealing.

zalthor• 15 years ago

When I was living in the United states I was able to use services like Netflix and spotify and get the content I wanted whenever I wanted where ever I wanted. Now, I that live in India, I cannot get that content legally. I cannot watch the TV shows I want to watch as they are aired (I have to wait 2-3 years for stuff to come on TV). The ONLY option I have is to download tv shows via torrents / find some online stream and discover new music via grooveshark. Its not that I can't pay for the content, or don't want to, its that I quite literally cant!

MengYuanLong• 15 years ago

China is equally fun. Piracy is simply a fact. Universities use pirated windows XP. Street vendors sell every sort of game in plastic sleeves for a few kuai (approx 0.50 USD). Computer shops and tech markets do the same. I suppose I could set out to buy the "real thing" but I honestly wouldn't know where to start. I could go by price but even then...

Even alcohol seems questionable often times. I am fairly confident I have yet to buy a bottle of gin/vodka/whiskey that hasn't been somehow meddled with. After all, if I put it in the freezer it always freezes.

After writing this I guess I realize it is somewhat OT but it does signify that you have a major problem when the fake is nearly indistinguishable from the real.

nickik• 15 years ago

Its an intressting casestudy. What would happen if the hole world would be like in china. Basiclly no copyright. Hard to imagen nowdays.

Countries like china often start copying everthing an then start to innovate themselfs skip a century (or half) and its the other way around.

siphr• 15 years ago

zalthor: You've highlighted a very important point here. One which a lot of people overlook and that is the unavailability of the content in most south-east-asian countries. Piracy, I believe, is the norm there and if it were not for piracy most of the countries over there would be severely lacking in terms of knowledge and awareness of a specific domain (for e.g: cultural awareness in terms of movies and music piracy).

Having said that I think it is also quite difficult for the "greedy" companies to sell in these countries at the price points that would have suitable returns. This is because of the fact that the masses in these countries simply cannot afford to pay that much. This does not necessarily mean they should suffer for it.

So, pirates are actually heroes in these regions no matter what anybody says because a genuine audience/market for them exists in poor/sanctioned countries around the world. SOPA or whatever other concoction they have in the rabbit hat, would do very little to affect the usual business of the day.

oscardelben• 15 years ago

Europe is the same. I'd like to pay for movies through itunes but they're simply not available.

sek• 15 years ago

No just in Asian countries. In Germany we have to hope something is successful enough to be shown on TV and then with a horrible German translation. The only way to watch this in original would be waiting 3 Years for a DVD version.

I envy you Americans for Netflix, we have nothing like that here.

Historiopode• 15 years ago

Europe is the same, indeed. I wish general and regional distribution issues received more attention when discussing piracy, the latter point standing despite (this) web being US-centric. Publishers deliberately introduce artificious policies, while outdated and unsynchronized legislations contribute to hinder positive efforts. The eventual result for the end-user who is not living the God-Blessed American Way is an imperscrutable buffer of tedious, incoherent obstacles – all of which are easily overcame with piracy, which plainly offers a better experience. This is particularly true for the movie and TV industry, while music and software seem to be gradually improving. This particular issue, however, stems from deeper localist inadequacies that, I suspect, might start to influence things more significant than our entertainment, such as upcoming payment services (e.g. Stripe, which is currently locked-in the US); they are already proving troublesome for financial and fiscal activities. Briefly said: while the Internet is a naturally global technology, middle-men are mostly attempting to costrain it to fit their previous business models. This is, I reckon, both terrible for service quality – and, more theatrically, a wasted chance for progressing part of our cultures past petty nationalisms.

absconditus3• 15 years ago

That is not your only option. You could also choose not to watch those shows at all. Desires are poor justification for such behavior.

prodigal_erik3• 15 years ago

When they aren't accepting payment, not getting paid is no opportunity cost to them. An act which slightly increases my happiness and wealth, without imposing harm or costs on anyone, is its own justification. How would you advocate deprivation which doesn't even benefit anyone?

planb• 15 years ago

A lot of his arguments are centered around the music industry, but guess what: You can get a high quality, DRM free song with just one click for about $1 today. This makes his whole blog post sound like an uninformed, whiny rant.

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

Not for every artist and not in every country.

absconditus3• 15 years ago

Oh, then ignore the rules in all cases.

cientifico• 15 years ago

I wan't to buy "How I Meet your Mother" on English with spanish subtitles. I am from Spain and live on Germany.

The only option to get the content I am looking for is through megavideo/piratebay.

With the films, happen the same. If I use my iTunes spanish account, the content is delayed 6 months, no tv shows and all of them in spanish. If I use a German account, I only get German content.

I pay spotify premium since two years ago. But for tv shows and films. The only content i can get is from sites like megavideo/piratebay, etc.

This industry is the only one that doesn't offer to the client what the client wants. Easy.

junto3• 15 years ago

I feel your pain. Unless you are English speaking in the USA, Spanish speaking in Spain, or German speaking in Germany then you are an edge case.

I pity the 14 million "edge case" Catalan speakers in Spain.

ravenheart4• 15 years ago

14 million?

Accordingo to this:

http://www.caib.es/conselleries/educacio/dgpoling/user/catal... (sorry, spanish) there are around 7 million Catalan speakers in all europe (including Spain, Andorra, France and Italy).

Your argument holds, still. Indeed, I'm pretty sure most content is available in Catalan here in Spain. I would be more worried about the italian ones, or even the french.

thomasgerbe• 15 years ago

Or you could just not watch it? It's not like your life would be worse off or there aren't alternative culture you could consume.

VonLipwig• 15 years ago

The only thing I agree with in this article is that film / music industry products often do not provide a good service. They are riddled with copy protection and unskippable ad's which punish people who actually buy the damn things.

Take this ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xj4jS8cho

This the truth...

You spent an hour to go to the shop's and buy it / waited a day for delivery He spent 15 minutes downloading it.

You have to sit though ad's you cannot skip. You have to watch a 39 second anti-piracy ad on a legitimate DVD. You have to wait 30 seconds for the title menu to load because some moron decided to show clips of the film you want to fecking play before it appears!

He is already 5 minutes into the film.

------------------

Its horrible.

As for the rest of the arguments I disagree.

1) Because you don't use my money well

It doesn't matter how they spend there money. They are provided a product that you want. If they didn't exist the product wouldn't exist.

"Everything else was probably diluted in stuffs I don't need: packaging, distribution, transport, marketing,"

If they didn't market you wouldn't have heard about it. If they didn't pay for distribution you wouldn't be able to get it. If they didn't pay for packaging you would receive a scratched, perhaps broken CD...

2) Because you are messing with my life

"Worst, you will use my money to sue me in court because I would have downloaded something that I didn't want to buy anyway!"

Yeah.. your like stealing their stuff? Why shouldn't they come after you? If you don't want it don't download. If you download it.. don't pretend you didn't want it.

"With the change left, you will pay lobbyists to ensure the governments make stupid and dangerous laws."

The politicians pass the law's. I see nothing wrong with the music / film industry lobbying to protect their interest's. Where it gets scary is when politicians act on the side of lobbyists without considering the wider picture.

3) Because you are destroying the whole society

I agree there are problems but I completely disagree that these problems are all caused by the film and music industry. I didn't know EMI signed teachers for their lectures?

Finally...

"If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off. In your arrogance, you are hurting the fundamental value of freedom only to save your little petty interests."

I guess big hollywood movies and the majority of career musicians can fuck off as well aye?

true_religion• 15 years ago

I've always wondered what odd confusion of emotions could make someone say they are a thief and proud of it.

I can understand those who claim that what they are doing isn't thievery.

I can understand those that don't accept the idea of intellectual property in general.

But for you to both buy into the philosophy that what you are taking is valuable, and ought to be protected---then still steal it proudly..... that is one thing I can't understand.

Aren't people supposed to want to be good?

ZenPsycho10• 15 years ago

Sometimes people want to be bad to other people they don't like.

baq• 15 years ago

what if you believe being a thief is a good thing?

dagw• 15 years ago

Aren't people supposed to want to be good?

Many people believe that punishing people whom in their eyes are doing wrong is a good and righteous act, irregardless of any local law. In the legend of Robin Hood, Robin is generally seen as a "good person" and the hero in most tellings, despite being a thief and a criminal.

vlasta2• 15 years ago

One more point worth considering. We were conditioned to associate the music with the medium, because it was more profitable. Now it is not anymore and there lies the problem.

In the past I bought a MC and then I bought a CD. I paid twice for the same work. Did the shop offer me a discount? No.

Do I get a discount when I watch the same movie twice in a cinema or if I buy a DVD after I have seen the movie in the cinema? No.

Do I get easy access to mp3 if I buy a CD? No.

The movie/music industry simply sends the wrong signals...

NSMeta• 15 years ago

I bought all the albums of my favourite performer and don't want to scratch the CDs or waste my time to rip the music from CDs, hence I download them from the web.

Does that count as piracy?

ZenPsycho10• 15 years ago

yes it does.

burgerbrain11• 15 years ago

No it does not. He has a license for that media.

NameNickHN• 15 years ago

I'm surprised that only MPAA staff is commenting on this link.

rythie2• 15 years ago

"I launch a search and I click. In less than 10 minutes, I've a full movie on my disk. In 20, I've the complete discography of an artist."

When I hear about stuff like this, along with people's multi-terabyte arrays of content, I wonder if they actually listen/watch much of it. Movie/Record companies are worrying that this all got "stolen" but if it was never viewed was it actually "stolen"?

JumpCrisscross7• 15 years ago

That's interesting - if I pirate a song but never hear it, did I violate the gestalt of IP protection?

Almost purely philosophical as answering in the negative would inherently cripple the enforceability of copyright laws. But interesting nevertheless given the party line is the IP grants a purchaser a licence to consume the content.

aangjie3• 15 years ago

Thanks for that quote license to consume... No problem.. am already cutting down my consumption and will just not consume.. bye..corporations with big IP portfolio.....

Jem• 15 years ago

I am reminded of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

aangjie3• 15 years ago

That's akin to the philosophical "tree falling in a forest, without anyone hearing" it question.. Unfortunately, i haven't come across any approach to the answers i find interesting..:-(

aangjie3• 15 years ago

Oops.. simultaneous posts.... .downvoting sounds harsh..but hey life isn't fair..shrug...:)

paul9290• 15 years ago

The OP's last sentence saying goodbye your demise is soon or something to that extent is funny.

There is always going to be a music and or movie business, as human beings since the dawn of time have fawned over larger then life figures. THere is a business around this (Justin Bieber) and there always will be.

JumpCrisscross7• 15 years ago

I think he was saying good-bye to the distributors, i.e. record labels, whom he sees as superfluous given digital distribution and marketing platforms.

Zirro• 15 years ago

How about those of us who live where getting certain products legally is essentially impossible? In my case, these are anime-series and documentaries, neither which can be bought where I live. What should I do, if I really want to watch these, and have no way of getting them except for P2P?

(Fun fact: Availability was what "drove" me into piracy in the first place. There was a TV-show which had aired about a year earlier, which I had missed then but wanted to see. I tried every legal way to obtain it that I could think of, because I believed piracy was wrong at the time, but it was simply not for sale. In the end, I ended up with my first torrent downloading.)

absconditus3• 15 years ago

I promise that you will not perish if you do not fulfill your every desire.

kittxkat• 15 years ago

> (Fun fact: Availability was what "drove" me into piracy in the first place. There was a TV-show which had aired about a year earlier, which I had missed then but wanted to see. I tried every legal way to obtain it that I could think of, because I believed piracy was wrong at the time, but it was simply not for sale. In the end, I ended up with my first torrent downloading.)

This is also the very reason that that drove me (and thousands of others too, I'm sure) to piracy and the one reason why I still do it. Even if I really wanted to support that TV show, sometimes it's just not possible (Case in point: The comedy show "The Class", it's simply nowhere available on DVD or similar, yet all episodes are on The Bay. How am I supposed to not torrent that stuff if I wanted to watch it?).

adaml_623• 15 years ago

From my point of view the content that the artivle is talking about is the equivalent of candy.

By pirating this content you are the same as a child stealing candy. The analogy is obviously imperfect because a shop owner is directly damaged by the physical theft but my point is that a child does not need sweets. And 'pirates' do not need bland tv shows distracting them from so many other things in this world that are more deserving of time.

'Pirates' just seem to be sadder version of consumers who don't even help the economy. Little black holes taking and giving nothing back.

I feel sadness that these people try to justify their activities and ally themselves with the SOPA protests.

stefanve• 15 years ago

I like to pay for my stuff, most software I use is either OSS or I payed for it. I have tucked a way in the attic over 500 CD's. I didn't buy any CD in the last 8 years or so. I used to download all the music I liked (but I still go to concerts). Than emusic came along and I used that, until lots of labels stopped using it and it became more expensive. Now I'm a happy Spotify user. So I didn't download music in the last 4 years or so. The only thing that is left is movies and TV-series I download a lot (and still go to the movies). I tried Jaman but there is not allot of quality content (I did get 3 credits free but never used it since movies I liked where not available in my country).

I would pay 50~100 euro per month for a all you can eat package providing that episodes are available with in a week of first broadcast (not in my country but global) and movies are available with in a month after showing in the theater. I asked around (yes very scientific) and most people would to that to.

So I have this money to give to the industry (max 1200 euro per year) but there is no service to give the money to. You could say go rend a movie (if you still can find such a place) but I refuse to pay 5 euro for a sloppy movie (the best movies I see in the theater any ways). You could say buy the movie but I'm not willing to pay 20 euro for a single Blu-ray. If tomorrow I could not download movies and TV-series any more I still wouldn't do that). In almost every other industry products follow demand but apparently the entertainment industry thinks they are above basic free market economics.

JumpCrisscross7• 15 years ago

I cannot sympathise with the OP on the whole. The music and publishing industries, though kicking and screaming, are on the whole evolving. The film industry hasn't figured out heads from tails, but neither did Kodak and we don't call their incompetence evil.

Where I converge is on the fury and destructiveness inherent in SOPA/PIPA. This rather-burn-Berlin-than-see-her-fall attack on America's (and through legislative export, the world's) creative and innovative centres is selfish and un-forgivable.

I also cannot help but notice the parallels in social malignancy between the banks Dodd used to regulate and the MPAA he commands today.

poub• 15 years ago

The author should have read first http://thepiratesdilemma.com/ before publishing his article.

nattyackermann• 15 years ago

Instead of fighting to pass laws and restrictions, find ways to offer US the CONSUMERS BETTER QUALITY that we would be willing to pay for. Let go of the obsolete, and adapt and take advantage of change. CDs are obsolete.

Radiohead is an AMAZING band that has offered their album up for free on the internet and they are still hugely successful. Take a clue from them.

CHANGE and sharing IS A GOOD THING.

phzbOx• 15 years ago

He's good a point about the easiness of downloading/watching. Here's a real story: In Canada, it seems like all streaming music websites are illegal. (Spotify, pandora, <you name it>). But, I still wanted to be legal. So, at the end, I had to "hack" my way to download spotify and listen to it. Isn't that stupid? If they decide that spotify is illegal, at least give me a better solution.

MaxPresman• 15 years ago

Rdio has Canadian content, and there isn't a law against streaming music in Canada, the reason most music services do no bother is because of the expensive and complicated structure of the paid royalties. It's hard to get the initial license and almost impossible to satisfy the royalty payments,

Most music startups that stream music do not bother with canada, and that's sad.

Read the article why pandora decided to quit the Canadian market, sad true story

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JgGeRC_...

ewams• 15 years ago

Has anyone else noticed all of the "I had to" or "There was no other option" for their rational? It sounds like you are addicted to drugs! Is the media you are consuming really that good? Do you have to take a hit everyday? Are you addicted to TV, movies and music? Sure sounds like it to me.

ssgrfk• 15 years ago

Downloading music for free that is available to buy, is immoral.. If artists can't earn money from their art, there will be less art and more lady GaGa VS justin bieber shit.. Do you want to live in that world?

scotty793• 15 years ago

So piracy is now to blame for "lady GaGa VS justin bieber"? That fresh. I was under the impression that this was exactly what copyright brought us.

nuttendorfer• 15 years ago

No, there will only be art from people who actually love to do it and are not in it for the money.

ravenheart4• 15 years ago

Neil Gaiman on piracy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI

pinaceae• 15 years ago

others have pointed out the problem of global availability vs. artificial rights barriers.

i'd like to add one more thing, in regards of music:

why should i pay for digital music reproduction?

1., radio is free

2., internet radio covers so much, i can listen to anything, for free (more channels than ever)

3., on demand is solved by youtube, which is already the biggest music platform bar none. some music video have 100+ million playcounts!

4., a lot of those youtube videos are legal by now, put up there by the industry themselves. they price their own content as ZERO.

and then there are the specialty sites, like soundcloud, 8tracks, wearehunted,... all that music, on demand, for free. mainstream stuff, not some basement bands.

the industry is pricing their content as free in a lot of channels already. so, sorry, hard to see that saving a youtube vid as an mp3 is actual piracy.

kamaal• 15 years ago

Ok,

Let me tell you why Piracy, it works most people who sell stuff them self want piracy to work.

To start with this let me tell you something. I didn't have genuine exposure to computers until I was 17, The first time I really worked with a computer seriously was in First semester engineering. Here in India it was not very easy to afford computers for guys like me. In the first semester I went to a friends home who had a PC. And he had Windows installed. I guess it was XP. Another friend said he is soon buying a PC and wanted the Win XP CD. I was flabbergasted to know how easy it was to just copy the CD and install the OS on an machine.

Only many days later did I learn, If Microsoft wanted they could stop piracy easily. But they don't! Why? Because they want people to be trained in it, right from college. So that when they get jobs their employers are forced to buy the OS they are trained to work in. Most of my friends also bought endless pirated game CD's. Here in Gandhinagar, Bangalore you can buy pirated CD's like peanuts on the footpath. Again, why don't they stop it? They can if they want! But why the hell don't they do it?

Now coming to Music and art piracy. Even here, upcoming musicians can't really expect people to shell out money for their work. Piracy acts as an easy distribution medium. Trust me piracy is a blessing in disguise for them.

Sorry to say, but you have all the power to stop this thing without stealing our liberties. But you don't.

Also expecting people to be morally upright and not get into Piracy is big BS according to me. Its like parking your Ferrari in a lonely street in the middle of the night, with the fuel tank full and keys inside. Its bound to be stolen, don't blame the world for it. You are to be blamed for not taking the right precautions when you actually could have!

If Microsoft bans Piracy in India. I assure you they will have to beg and plead with people to even make a single sale. People will be happy to buy a non OS installed computer and install Linux on it. They don't want that to happen, they know it, we know it.

This is why you can't end piracy.

smallblacksun• 15 years ago

>Only many days later did I learn, If Microsoft wanted they could stop piracy easily.

Microsoft spends millions fighting piracy. What is this magical way that Microsoft could "easily" stop piracy?

vikram360• 15 years ago

I've met this guy and he's even awesomer in person

edw519• 15 years ago

OP, if this is just a whine about how unfair the world is and how special you are, then fine.

But if it's an attempt to make something happen (stop SOPA), then it's not working and is in fact counterproductive, so please just STFU. You are offsetting the good hard work of so many others trying to make the right things happen.

Make no mistake about it, we have reached the point where the best course of action is probably to simply appeal to the common people's innate sense of "fairness".

Pirating is not right. Most people would agree with that, too.

Multiple wrongs do not make a right; most people's reptilian brains sense that, too.

Long ago, before the Code of Hammurabi, the common code of law was often unfair. If, for example, I accidently killed your daughter, the penalty was to put my daughter to death. Such logic today is laughable and modern people would never put up with it. Except that's exactly what SOPA is, penalizing Party B for Party A's transgression. We don't do that anymore.

There are other good arguments against SOPA, but yours is not one of them. Instead of influencing those who need to be influenced, you are just fanning the flames of SOPA proponents. Hell, after reading your article, I almost understand their reasoning...they need to do something to stop your wrong to stop someone else's wrong to stop someone else's wrong, etc.

It's time to stop the cycle of doing wrong to combat other wrong, and just start doing right. It works better anyway. It would be nice to have you on board for that.

I have more to say, but unfortunately, someone in another thread did something wrong, so a moderator has turned off the rest of my comment...

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ThomPete40• 15 years ago

Perhaps your "life is unfair" line could be extended to the artists who feel it's their natural right to take advantage of the diminishing costs of digital distribution.

richardw• 15 years ago

They aren't charging to get the song physically to you. They're charging you for the right to play it. Up until now, that has been easiest via payment on transfer of the physical good. Now that we have new mechanisms, they're still allowed to set the terms under which you may use their music.

For example, radio stations pay more. They may have the physical CD in their grasp, but they have to pay to play it on air. DVD shops get charged more per video because they rent it out repeatedly - they don't just use the same home version as you do and pocket the difference. Changing the distribution mechanism to radio stations and DVD shops to digital doesn't change the concept of copyright owners being able to set the terms of use for their content.

Now, would I like a whole new approach? Sure. I long for ways to reinvent the industry, like crowdsourcing aspects of music production, marketing etc. There will be many ways to make a living from music in the future. But that doesn't mean I think it's ok to just make up the rules as I go along and copy anything that I fancy.

ThomPete40• 15 years ago

That is the problem though. I am paying for the rights to pay for the music instead of paying for the music.

That is exactly where it went wrong.

bmelton3• 15 years ago

"Pirating is not right. Most people would agree with that, too."

The biggest problem I see today is that there are so many people who aren't even bothering to justify pirating, and instead insist that it is natural, good and just -- not just as a means to get access to content they otherwise wouldn't be able to, but for everything.

To draw my line in the sand, I have no problems with people pirating works they simply don't have any other access to. American shows that aren't broadcast overseas, for example; pirate away.

I don't personally do it, but I don't have any problems with those that do. Others, however, simply incur piracy as a matter of course. Looking for a new album to listen to? Limewire. Looking for a movie? Pirate Bay.

While I don't mind downvotes, that I repeatedly get voted down while suggesting that yes, even though copyright is wrong, it is the law, and people should either respect it or engage in civil disobedience (which is a public affair) instead of just casually pirating every piece of content they consume, it is telling of the more and more common mentality (or at least is becoming more common on HN.)

sbarre2• 15 years ago

> To draw my line in the sand, I have no problems with people pirating works they simply don't have any other access to. American shows that aren't broadcast overseas, for example; pirate away.

Really? The problem I have with this argument is that you remove control of the creation from the creator. What if they are in the process of trying to make a distribution deal while people cut off demand at the knees by stealing the product instead?

Much like the linked article, that position takes that control away. YES the industry sucks at distribution and their offerings are terrible and expensive, but I don't think that's an acceptable or legitimate reason to pirate things instead.

The legitimate option is GO WITHOUT IT. You have no RIGHT to anything here...

If the food is too expensive at your favourite restaurant, you don't pull a runner after the meal, you simply don't eat there, and you hope that in time the owners will realize and make adjustments. But if they choose not to, then that is their right.

billpatrianakos6• 15 years ago

It's so rare to find someone who thinks like me on this. There is a lot of bullying via downvotes when it comes to this. It seems you can't disagree. It becomes a big "let's pat each other on the back because we're all right" party.

But you're right. It seems like a lot of this bragging about piracy is a thinly veiled excuse and a thinly veiled justification of what they're doing. This a new phenomenon that I think people my age (20's) and younger are part of where we feel entitled to just get whatever via free downloads. It's so weird that a community all about business would have such an anti business view on this. It's one thing to be against SOPA-like laws and the growing power of copyright but why are we for totally abolishing it? It makes more sense to simply try to stop the overreach of power and scale back copyright.

Everyone is both a creator and a consumer. Those are two competing interests and business is all about competing interests and it makes the market go round. Swinging the power away from creators and giving it all to consumers is just as bad as doing the opposite. We should be fighting for the balance of rights and not trying to give it to any one group. Just because there are more of us than of them (in a sense) doesn't mean it's right. It's one thing to want to distribute income from the few to the many, to fight for the rights of minorities, etc. but this whole getting rid of copyright thing is strange. There's a part of me that sees it as a childish attempt to cry to get whatever you want for free.

etherael• 15 years ago

I think copyright infringement by itself is unfair and impolite, but at a certain point, some organisations have taken action that probably realigns the hierarchy of acceptable behaviour when it comes to copyright infringement.

Under no circumstances ever should people actively sabotaging the freedom of expression of the entire world ever be supported by any payments from anyone, ever. Especially not the people whose world they're trying to destroy. When it comes to organisations that have lobbied for or support SOPA, piracy of their works is to me the second best step on a ladder of approaches.

1) Boycott them, there is nothing wrong with this plan, you shoot yourself in the foot a little if they made something you want and you refuse to purchase it due to principles, but it's probably the most noble of all approaches.

2) Pirate anything they produce that you wish to consume. You may be making an impolite move and breaking a law that if it were used to protect other organisations that weren't such poisonous vile scum it would be immoral to break, but at least you're not feeding the beast.

3) Actually pay them for their content, at this stage you are not breaking any laws but you are effectively contributing to their continued existence and their lobbying to destroy the world as we know it.

If absolutely NOONE picks door number three, the problem will finally be solved. And this entire debacle is all the evidence anyone should ever need that they so desperately deserve destruction.

Naga• 15 years ago

That is, I think, the most salient part of the original post, one that I had never considered before. Buying anything from those organizations is effectively money going towards lobbying and DRM and all those harmful things. I had never looked at it that way before.

tomkin• 15 years ago

Great comment, although I'd like to add that I believe pirating isn't really an occupation of greed. It's about convenience. Finding and downloading movies is a pain in the ass. But driving 5km away to rent or buy a piece of plastic and packaging is even more of a pain in the ass.

For the past year I've been paying for Netflix, and while the selection isn't always the greatest, the sheer thought of pirating has gone down considerably.

Do I want to pay $8/mo or do I want to spend time finding, downloading, dealing with codecs, categorization and management of movies that I will probably delete later?

If Netflix could offer every movie, every tv show and/or a music subscription that worked on any device, would I ever want to pirate? Even if it was $20/mo?

As producers of creative works, we need to understand the psychology of our audience, more than we need to understand the economy of the industry.

slewis• 15 years ago

Devil's advocate: Where does civil disobedience fit in with "Multiple wrongs do not make a right"?

541564654• 15 years ago

Wow man, this guy is serious. Although I can see there are huge flaws in his argument I would really not like to debate someone's opinion just today. Instead I will tell you two silly reasons of why I pirate.

1. The prices are all wrong. If they want me to buy something I should be able to buy it. I am not saying that since I am a student I don't have the money to buy it. But spending 400 Bucks of my native currency for 12 songs is just ridiculous. I don't want to do that.

2. This is even more sillier, I pirate because I can. Maybe this is a usability problem, but I don't want to seem like I am on some kind of a high horse. But still, if you are willing to give me individual songs (I rarely want the whole album or OST) for cheap I will consider buying it. Payment is not that much of a problem, you can have a wallet like system.

kochbeck• 15 years ago

What's particularly galling about this post (and the SOPA / PIPA / whatever people on the other side too), is that I haven't found anyone on either side of the argument who's stopped and said, "Hey, wait! Somebody's getting some major economic benefit from piracy. Let's see who." Everyone - supporters and detractors alike - are either talking about their own positions (like this guy's) or these nebulous entities like the "music industry." (I worked in the "music industry," and I can't define it.)

The guy who wrote that is receiving, at best, nominal returns from criminality along with the satisfaction of making the, "Fuck you, that's why," argument. Crime isn't paying well at all for him, because he's committing a potentially life-altering crime in increments of $0.99 in music. So let's just set all those people aside for a moment, because on an individual basis, that's just a wreck to explain. Would take interpretive dance. These sorts of people only matter economically in the aggregate (think: Bittorrent), but "people-in-the-aggregate" isn't in charge, doesn't steer anything. Real individual human beings are.

So how about some individual human beings who are benefitting mightily from piracy? Somebody must be making out big time. They must have a lot of power and a strong justification for having the system be just so.

And if you took a moment to ask, say, the former CTO of any political campaign, they'd tell you who those people are. But since you didn't ask, I'll just tell you: it's politicians. Heard it here first people: political campaigns PIRATE THEIR ASSES OFF. I know with 100% certainty that one of the sponsoring senators for PIPA won big riding on top of a sea of pirated software in their campaign office. You betcha. One of the sponsors.

In the last decade, when money into campaigns has increased by orders of magnitude, piracy has actually increased on campaigns, many of which can now afford to pay. Why? Laptops. Back when desktops were still king, odds were good that you'd have one or two legal copies of, say, Office that you were installing across all the machines in your phone banks, another couple copies for your volunteer centers, maybe one for your staff offices... all those places where fixed machines were. So at least you were installing at like 5:1. Not legal, but not crazy.

But that's not how it works anymore. Now everybody plays BYOL. Need Office? Sure, there's a copy on Bob's shared drive. Need MapInfo? That's on a fileserver. And everybody at a machine (and I mean everybody) needs basic commercial software to work. Some need even more - the Adobe Suite or Visio or MapInfo or... it just goes on and on. Copies of SPSS floating around. If it's a campaign for an incumbent, you need, at minimum, everything on your desktop in the campaign that the staff on the Hill have, because you're going to be passing lots of files. So incumbents' campaigns tend to get right into piracy real fast, because they need application parity with their official staff.

Multiply that by every staffer and every intern and every volunteer who brings in their laptop and that's a huge number of copies. A successful presidential campaign is probably pirating on the order of at least 3,000+ copies of just Office alone. Seriously. Go audit Romney. They're there.

Funny thing is, it was the artists(!) who ultimately cracked down on the rights management firms that made campaigns stop pirating music. Possibly the one time ASCAP and BMI actually did anything for the artists, and it was against politicians. The deal was, artists were tired of politicians they didn't agree with playing uncleared, public performances of their music. If they hated the guy, they sure didn't want him to also get the music for free. So the rights firms cracked down. Odds are, big campaigns now have a CD of cleared music with usually BMI. They don't do it till they think they're likely to get caught, so they STILL PIRATE THE DAMN MUSIC. But eventually they make good. Want to check that one out? Call the compliance desk at the folding Cain campaign and ask if you can see their BMI clearances. Bet they don't have any - they bowed out too soon to get caught.

Oh, oh! Don't forget TV. A good rapid response operation is capturing all the news in areas in play and all the advertising for themselves and their opponents. Nowadays, there are firms that suck it down, and then they take the files and share them around the office. Much like Pirate Bay in the TV section. "Hey, did you see yesterday's AC360 on the other guy? Here's a copy!" Back when I was doing this crap, TiVo was still pretty much the best you could do on short notice, so I had a shelf of hacked TiVos. Ah, how life has gotten easier.

One more thing. Lists. Copyrighted lists. Mailing lists. Demo data. All the information detritus from campaigning. Stealing lists is a serious no-no. Reason being, the way politicians get rich (if they don't start rich, of course) is their list: because your campaign is not a shareholder-based corporation, the candidate ends up owning the assets. The key asset that gets created is the supporter list. A good list from a very successful national single run can bring in millions. Even for the loser.

So lists are precious. You'd think that somehow there would be an honor code around this, at least. "Thou shalt not screw thy coworkers out of their primary asset." That would, unfortunately, be untrue. Go ask any campaign data manager how they've "salted" their list. They'll tell you. They hide tripwire data in the list - emails that go to warning scripts or phone numbers that forward to their own cell. Because pirating each other's data in politics is also a national tradition.

A few things, some of them quite complex, are at the root of all this. A good example is campaign finance reform where there are matching funds spending caps and such. Piracy is a really good way to keep from moving spent money into, say, Iowa and incrementally lay waste to the cap before you've decided if you're going to get matched. It's a complex set of considerations and public perceptions. There are a lot of little dances that campaigns do, and piracy is a really good way to disappear major expenses in a very cash-constrained environment.

But a very senior Democratic political operative sat me down once when I was trying to convince him to buy legal licenses for an Iowa office. He said, "Dave, here's the deal: if we lose, there's nothing to go after. We'll leave the stage with negative money and nobody to pin it on. If we win, we are the Executive Office of the President, and we've got the Antitrust Division. Do you really think Microsoft, of all companies, is looking to pick that fight?"

tl;dr: Politicians operate vast organizations with questionable legal practices called campaigns. These campaigns get them elected to power and make them rich. Once elected, they legislate against the citizenry doing the things they did to gain power and wealth. This is not a conspiracy. Turns out they're just assholes.

Aissen• 15 years ago

No one seems to address the third argument: giving the "Entertainment" industry more money, is giving them means to lobby for liberticide laws, like SOPA, ACTA … Is the only solution to isolate oneself from popular media ? At the price of cultural impoverishment ?

Hari_Seldon• 15 years ago

Those of you who continually refer to piracy as stealing are muddying the waters. I agree that it is morally wrong to download copyrighted works without paying for them, but whenever someone uses the word theft, I switch off.

It is akin to borrowing a book and then scanning it and using OCR to make an ebook before it is returned to the owner. Or ripping a friend's CD. I don't think a reasonable person would describe this as stealing. This is exactly what file sharing is, except that the scanning/ripping has already been done.

By insisting that this is "stealing" you will alienate some people who might be open to persuasion and to changing their behaviour. They know that they have not deprived the owner of it's use and that they have not stolen anything.

Stop talking about stealing, it's lazy

drstrangevibes• 15 years ago

A lot of the pro copyright guys dont know what the purpose of copyright IS. So before you argue please research what you are arguing in favour of. In short copyright originated with the statute of Anne 1709 to protect authors from the publishers profiting from their work, the statute main purpose was to promote learning by allowing creators to recoup the expensive cost of publishing a) the publishers are now ripping off creators, b) publishing is not longer expensive c) placing easily accessible SCIENCE papers under DRM prohibits learning

pgvoorhees• 15 years ago

It's fine that the OP doesn't want to pay for media. But, the OP should not take it, no matter how easy it is to do. By all means, abstain from media. But do not steal.

kin• 15 years ago

His point is that he doesn't want to pay for distribution. He's more than happy to support artists directly.

powertower• 15 years ago

TL;DR;

"It's more convenient and less expensive to pirate!"

ssharp• 15 years ago

This is just another in a long-line of poorly reasoned reasons against SOPA.

I don't know if this article touched on the entire "we'll pay for cheap streaming thing", but I've heard it enough times and think it's relevant enough to discuss in this topic.

I'm curious to how much time people are really spending thinking about things from the perspective of the movie studios. For users, it's easy to say "charge me $10/month and I'll gladly pay". From the movie studio's perspective, that probably sounds AWFUL. Does the music industry really like paying fractions of a penny per play on Pandora, Spotify, etc.? Absolutely not. For them, however, it's better than the alternative. For the movie studios, it's not. At least not yet.

The movie business model is designed to price discriminate. They charge consumers on a sliding scale. When a movie first comes out, it's only available in theaters at the cost of, let's say, $10 per person. Then it moves to the second-run theaters at $5 per person. Then it goes to video for $20 to own, or $5 / household to rent. Then it goes to on-demand/redbox/itunes/etc. for $5/6 to rent. Then it goes to premium cable, where money is distributed via pre-arranged agreements. Then it becomes an "archival" video and can be rented for $2/3 at a store or on-demand.

The movie studios are going for maximum profits by attempting to charge people the exact price they're willing to pay, when they're willing to pay it. Of course, they have to settle for inefficiencies because they cannot create a perfect discrimination model.

Regarding the pedants of the "stealing" thing, what you're stealing when you pirate something is missed revenues. Just because you're taking a digital good instead of a physical one should have no effect on the outcome of your actions. If you steal a physical CD that normally costs $12.99, you're not stealing $12.99 worth of stock from the music industry. The margins are purposefully high on CD's, and you're stealing those margins, not $12.99 worth of a physical product.

grellas• 15 years ago

Creative effort - or at at least any that is truly worthy of the name - takes tears, and sweat, and blood. We can marvel at the output of an artist, or a writer, or a composer, or a film maker and yet fail to focus on the years of toil that often preceded that work. And I am not here speaking of some isolated genius. I still remember the days when I was so dissatisfied with my lack of writing skills that I decided to devour the subject with a non-stop investment of thousands of hours of work specifically aimed at improving those skills - and the seemingly fruitless results of what seemed to be mediocre output at the time - only to wind up, in time, with some degree competence in that area, competence that has served me well professionally and otherwise as I now exercise that skill set in various ways. That sort of creativity is something we all can do, each in his own way, and it is therefore common to us all and not limited to the work of the occasional genius. We all can create, some better than others, and we can all rejoice in that process because it is one of the fundamentally rewarding things we can do in life. It is in our nature to build things, and to improve upon them, and to innovate. This can be in writing, or drawing, or painting, or sculpting, or coding, or composing, or performing, or doing any other act requiring creativity. This is not some trivial take-it-or-leave-it part of life. It is often what defines us at our core.

Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work. If I write something, I control what is done with it. No random person can just come along and appropriate it to that person's use or profit. I can say no to that or I can say yes, as I determine. If I say yes, I can require that person to compensate me for using my work or I can decide that I don't want compensation because I want others to freely benefit from my work. The point is that it is my decision. I have sole control over what is done with that which I create. Why? Because the law protects that right. And it does so, for the most part, through copyright.

When people propose that copyright be abolished, they are saying, if effect, that anybody who produces a creative work immediately forfeits any right to control it and that any random person can come along and freely enjoy the benefits of that work and also freely reproduce and distribute that work. Under that sort of legal system, I can attempt to sell my work, or license it, or perform it publicly, but anybody else can do the same. Why? Because it is no longer "my" work, at least not legally. It is not protected in any way from the efforts of others to exploit it commercially or to give it away as they like. It is anyone's right to do with it what he will. Now, of course, I may rejoice in this. I may desire to create something wonderful and see to it that it is freely distributed to the maximum degree possible because I feel it is important that people benefit from my creative output without any obligation to me. Under a society in which copyright is protected, I can freely choose to do that if I like. I can place my work in the public domain and relinquish any right to compensation for it. Or I can let others use it freely but only on if they meet some condition that I impose on it, such as giving me attribution. The point is that this is my decision. If copyright does not exist, though, I have no such rights and I have no such control. In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process. In such a system, anything created by anybody is simply common property. People can use it for good or for bad but I have no say in it. I may be the creator but that is beside the point. People like the author of this piece can simply saunter by and take it for whatever use the like.

When a society makes a decision to defend the right of a creative person to control his work, and to profit from it or give it away as he likes, it has to make all sorts of policy decisions. Should such control last indefinitely? Of course not. Why? Because the benefits that we all get from being able to control our creative work only last so long. After a time, and certainly after we die, we have presumably exhausted whatever benefit we get from such control. Then too, others also create and, in time, all sorts of people borrow from one another and build upon the efforts of others regardless of the degree of creativity that they add to the process. Given enough time, we get what is known as a "common heritage" - something that far transcends the creative work of any one person. And so we have what is known as a public domain - a rich collection of creative output that is freely available to all. Those who value copyright and its social benefits in protecting creative output also value the public domain because it is a natural concomitant to the protected core of works that fall under copyright in any given generation. Indeed, a key aspect of copyright is precisely to encourage people to create - to invest the very blood and sweat that it often takes to do something great - in order that society generally will be enhanced and improved as creative works are done, are made available to the world as the creator may decide, and eventually pass into the public domain. So a fundamental tenet of copyright is that it cannot be absolute. It needs to be strictly bounded to achieve its legitimate goals without being extended to a point where it defeats those goals and gives special privileges to persons for no good reason.

Today, copyright has been seriously abused in the U.S. and elsewhere and needs to be fixed. In particular, terms of copyright need to be brought back to sensible levels. The public domain as it exists needs to be preserved and a better system needs to be in place by which orphaned works can freely enter the public domain. Many other fixes are needed as well. What is most definitely not needed is a SOPA-style enforcement scheme that opens up legal channels to copyright holders that would permit all sorts of abusive actions against innocent parties in the name of copyright enforcement. This sort of thing merely perpetuates the abuse and does not fix anything. Those who have been paying attention strongly sense this, and it has been pretty amazing to watch people unite to oppose the back-room sleaziness that led to such legislative efforts in the first place.

To defeat SOPA, though, one must affirm copyright. Just as we recoil at legal abuse in a SOPA-style scheme, we equally recoil at self-righteous claims that people can freely take what others create with no consideration whatever given to those who create it. That sort of radical assertion will get us nowhere when it comes to shaping serious legal policy in the SOPA debate. It needs to be roundly rejected.

wwwtyro4• 15 years ago

> When people propose that copyright be abolished, they are saying, if effect, that anybody who produces a creative work immediately forfeits any right to control it and that any random person can come along and freely enjoy the benefits of that work and also freely reproduce and distribute that work.

I could not disagree more. If someone creates a work of art, they only own the physical manifestation of that creation. They can guard that physical manifestation, thereby preventing its release into the public domain until such a time as it may profit them. What they do not own is other people's property, so to force other people to not do with their property what they please simply because someone else had a thought first is unethical. It's an understandable, knee-jerk, brute-force means of providing a business model to artists, but it is still unethical.

Find. Another. Way.

route662• 15 years ago

So, I'm a musician. What "physical manifestation" are you talking about? Compressed air? Because as soon as I make a record I have to "guard that physical manifestation" ... how? with SOPA? preventing CD'd from being sold?

And in short you deny artists of ownership of anything else than the physical representation (unethical!) But in the next sentence you make the creation "other people's property". If I think of something you did not, this robs me of rights and automatically gives entitlement to you?

Spoom3• 15 years ago

While I realize that it can't happen any time soon due to the current businesses that rely on copyright protection, there have been alternatives proposed that work without it, like The Digital Art Auction ( http://tdaa.digitalproductions.co.uk/history/essay.htm ) and Street Performer Protocol ( http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html , blacked out due to SOPA as of writing). Vastly simplified, they describe a system in which an artist describes a work they would create, and the money they would like to raise to release such a work. People bid on how much they would pay to see the work released. This bid is either collected into an escrow account up front or otherwise "pledged" in some binding way (perhaps a credit card auth). Once the threshold of pledges is reached, the money is released to the artist and the art is released to the public.

These threshold pledge systems all have the weakness that the work must be paid for up front, after which (since one assumes a lack of copyright) the work is public domain. In some ways this may not actually be a weakness, though; it transforms users into investors, making them say, "I would like something that does / has X and Y, and I would be willing to pay $Z to get it." Of course, this system does not entail any per-copy price... however, nowadays the cost to create a copy of something is approaching zero anyway. Does it really make sense to continue to charge a per-copy fee? Charging a subscription fee, however, would still be possible in many circumstances, if a service was actually being offered.

What are your thoughts on such systems?

ensignavenger2• 15 years ago

"I have sole control over what is done with that which I create."

Actually, the US Constitution only allows for limited control, not unlimited control. The Constitution requires Fair Use exceptions to your control of your created works.

wglb• 15 years ago

While your conclusion is correct, isn't it other later case law that permitted Fair Use? I don't think that is actually in the constitution.

Derbasti• 15 years ago

The problem is not copyright itself. The problem is that the creators are not the copyright owners any more.

This is a very subtle distinction. We should do all we can to help creators, not publishers. Publishers have their place in the distribution chain, but they should not be allowed to act as if they were the creators.

If the publisher's business model is failing, so be it. Publishers and gatekeepers are not worth saving. Creators are. Support creators. Buy CDs directly from the artists. Buy them through the shortest distribution chain possible (even if that might be Amazon or Apple).

Create laws that make copyright an unalienable right, thus forcing publishers back to the publishing business that is rightly theirs.

andylei• 15 years ago

what are you suggesting? banning contracts for distribution agreements? what exactly is a law that makes "copyright an unalienable right"?

literalusername• 15 years ago

Unalienable rights can not be created or destroyed; the law only attempts to offer legal protection for them.

Furthermore, if an artist wants to sell IP ownership of his work then there's no reason he shouldn't be free to do so.

Your main point, however, is a good one. Disruptive distribution channels should be able to fix this by allowing artists to make good money without selling out to big media companies.

teamonkey2• 15 years ago

> The problem is that the creators are not the copyright owners any more.

I'm not sure.

A singer and songwriter aren't the only people involved in a music product. Likewise a song isn't the only thing involved in a music track. It involves production, for example, investment, the confluence of a variety of artistic, technical, management and manufacturing skills. Why shouldn't a music company have some claim over the copyright of the finished product?

hxa72413• 15 years ago

> The point is that this is my decision.

Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do?

> In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process.

This is a common approach, but it completely fails as a moral argument. You are saying it is right because it is good for creators. That is an argument of self-interest, and problem is it immediately justifies its opposite. A non-owner can simply say: disobeying the law serves my self-interest, therefore that is right for me.

But it is also short-sighted. You are not only a 'creator', you are a user too. One might well be the greatest writer of books, for example, and so benefit from increased copyright/IP rights. But one will probably not also be the greatest music composer, and the greatest film-maker, and software developer, and so on. We are net consumers, in a sense. To give producers more is to take more from ourselves.

Ultimately, we grant IP rights not because they are for producers, but because they are pragmatically supposed to be useful overall -- that is the only justification. There is no other, no sensible rational purely moral argument, for copyright/IP. That ought always to be remembered.

geon• 15 years ago

This is hands down the best summary of my thoughts on copyright.

ThomPete40• 15 years ago

Exactly

you could also ask

What if the instrument creators started to license the use of their guitars, drums and people had to pay royalties.

adharmad• 15 years ago

> > The point is that this is my decision. > Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do?

Because, the creative work would not exist if not for the creator. If you take away the creator's right (and I am not arguing that it should be infinite and indefinite), you take away the incentive to produce and expose creative work. In effect, everyone loses.

billpatrianakos6• 15 years ago

> Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do?

Then the alternative is that all creators keep their output to themselves and people with this entitled attitude never get to make use of their work. Or maybe they don't make something at all. Or maybe they don't even try to learn to make something and get a "real" job because anything they would create is no longer able to buy them lunch. There are people who want to give works away free and for them that's great but what gives any of us the rights to something someone else has made? It's one thing to come across a piece of work legitimately and then be able to do as you please with it.

The music industry is an easy target and even I have a hard time defending them. What about software though? A lot of us here make our living partly due to the protections of copyright. It's one thing to circumvent Apple or Microsoft and pirate some software but what about the indie developer? That guy can't make up the costs with live performances like other types of creators. You either pay for a copy or you don't. If one copy gets bought and 500 get pirated then that guy just got royally screwed. Not all software lends itself to free downloads with paid support. Not all software can be SaaS. So what then? Even open source developers have day jobs. You can't live on PayPal donations and Flattrs.

This whole anti-copyright argument sounds wonderful but the world isn't ready yet. Maybe in another 20 years. The answer isn't to get rid of copyright, the answer is to scale it back to a point where it's more sane.

sequoia4• 15 years ago

Let me first state that I'm in basically total agreement with OP and mostly agree with parent, but one point sticks in my craw:

>> The point is that this is my decision.

>Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do?

http://thegatheringplacehome.myfastforum.org/archive/life-le...

"Granting the hen the right to distribute (or not) the bread takes that right away from everyone else. How is this justified?" asked the cow.

Um, because the hen made the fucking bread, and the cow didn't. I think that our copyright system is bad, and I personally take similar stance to OP vis-a-vis Big Media, but you'll notice that OPs arguments are pragmatic. "You don't provide a good product" "You hurt me with the fees I pay" "The UX of pirating is better." He's attacking the lazy industry for litigating rather than innovating, attacking the middlemen who are McDucking in swimming pools of cash, and attacking their specious arguments about how you're "hurting the artist" (Funny coming from them: record companies aren't generally known for their generous behavior towards artists). Nowhere does he say "no one should have control over their own works."

nadam• 15 years ago

"But it is also short-sighted. You are not only a 'creator', you are a user too"

The question is: To what extent? If we measure how much income a person have from intellectual property and how much money they spend on intellectual property (if they not steal) then you will see the following:

Most people are only consumers.

A fraction of people create things as a hobby, so their consumption is not much smaller than their production.

A tiny fraction of people produce intellectual property for a living: their consumption is tiny compared to their production.

If you are in the first camp then in short term no-copyright may be good for you. But if you are in the 3rd camp, it is bad for you, because in that case you are 99% producer and 1% consumer of these kind of goods.

That's why I think that the no-copyright movement is unfortunatelly partly an anti-intellectual, populist, 'anti-civilisational', (ok, maybe anti elitist too) movement: the less creative people's fight to take away rights from more creative people. (And creativity is only partly talent, it is also really hard work, so this movement is against hard intellectual work.)

kgo2• 15 years ago

Apply this same argument to someone who spends hundreds of hours working so that they can buy a car. This is all done out of self interest. Most people would not conclude that it's okay for someone that a car thief, who steals the car because it serves his self interest. That this is somehow rational and moral because one person's self interest is equivalent to another person's self interest.

Of course people who are anti-copyright will be quick to point out that a bunch of bits on a disk that can be infinitely duplicated is different from a physical car. And that's true. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the blood, sweat, and tears that the creator invests in the act of creation.

I could post more far fetched analogies. It's in a woman's interest to have self control over her body. It's in a rapists best interest to take control of her body. Does the argument that each individuals self-interest is reciprocal apply in this case? Is that the "sensible rational purely moral" conclusion? Of course not. There are a myriad of other factors that need to be taken into consideration.

reedlaw• 15 years ago

Exactly right about failing as a moral argument. Copyright also fails on moral grounds by violating property rights. If I am not permitted to store certain sequences of bits on a hard drive, or paint a certain arrangement of colors, or hum a certain tune, then my right to use my property is effectively limited.

kotor• 15 years ago

>Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do?

Where does this argument end? Why can't I drive your car whenever I want? Is your "ownership" of your car really more valid than my ownership of something that I invested significant time and effort (maybe even money) to create, and if so, why?

onemoreact• 15 years ago

We both agree the idea that 65 years after your death your estate will still own the copyright to that post is insane. However, you defend the basic concept that copyright protects artists which enables them to produce more content. Yet, Shakespeare had no copyright protection so he produced more not less content. He still profited from his work, just not as much.

But, let's look at it from another direction. Simplify the tax code enough and H&R block goes out of business. That does not mean society is worse off. Copyright enriches artists at the cost of society but the real question is society bettor off. There is a deluge of new content, but the overwhelming majority truly interesting works are not for profit. I honestly think we would be bettor off if Avatar had never been created an instead we what artists do when they are not pandering to the largest audience possible.

PS: I don't listen to music. I don't watch TV. I do occasionally see a movie, but it's been a while. I used to do a fair amount of reading but I literally only follow a single author who I would just as soon donate to to keep them writing as buy their books. I do play WoW, but that's a subscription game which would survive just fine without copyright.

sanderjd• 15 years ago

Your comment seems to hinge on this idea that "the overwhelming majority of truly interesting works are not for profit", which seemed dubious, but interesting. Then you end with a disclaimer noting that you are an extreme outlier in your opinion and consumption of interesting works. Your comment could have been edited down to "I don't like for-profit works so if everyone liked the same things as I do, we wouldn't need copyright." It's an intriguing thought, and I'm fascinated by your rejection of our society's usual entertainments - is it a principled stand? do you really just dislike that stuff and like other things more? how and when did this start? - but it's not very germane to solving the wider society's issues with copyright because a lot of the rest of us are pretty into some of the books, music, and movies that are made for profit.

jmilloy• 15 years ago

>Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work.

I'm not sure about this. Copyright is aimed at enabling and encouraging creative works. It achieves this by giving the creator control. Here, the word giving is important; we only give the creator control because we think that will result in more high quality creative works (in theory).

>When people propose that copyright be abolished, they are saying, if effect, that anybody who produces a creative work immediately forfeits any right to control it.

Instead, they are saying that they no longer want to give away control to the creator, because copyright is not achieving the desired results.

>To defeat SOPA, though, one must affirm copyright.

Agreed. However, I think it's easier to discuss the goals, benefits, and extent of copyright law from the vantage point I've expressed above.

lemming• 15 years ago

... I was so dissatisfied with my lack of writing skills ... only to wind up, in time, with some degree competence in that area ...

And a total mastery of the art of understatement, clearly. Thank you for your contributions to this community, I am humbled by your continued willingness to invest time to improve it and your success at doing so.

mjwalshe• 15 years ago

Hear Hear

angersock7• 15 years ago

Under a society in which copyright is protected, I can freely choose to do that if I like. I can place my work in the public domain and relinquish any right to compensation for it.

As you can do in a society without copyright--that is your personal decision. Copyright is not required for you to do what you will with your stuff.

Or I can let others use it freely but only on if they meet some condition that I impose on it, such as giving me attribution. The point is that this is my decision.

It isn't, though, as we've shown empirically by this point. You cannot stop--physically, legally, or morally--others from doing with your work as they will, provided it exists in a digital form. That genie, as they say, is long since out of the bottle.

If copyright does not exist, though, I have no such rights and I have no such control.

You already have next to no control! Your "rights" are anything but!

In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process.

Why do you need a say? If it's information, it can be duplicated on their dime, and that is their decision. Why need you be involved?

Moreover, why does it matter if it is claimed as their own? It will eventually be found out and publicized if it really matters--or maybe you and your work aren't important enough to merit society's collective memory.

In such a system, anything created by anybody is simply common property. People can use it for good or for bad but I have no say in it.

Yep, that's about the size of it.

I may be the creator but that is beside the point. People like the author of this piece can simply saunter by and take it for whatever use the like.

And isn't that a wonderful thing? That people can build on and reuse the work of those that came before them? That they can do so without fear of reprisal and instead devote that energy to innovation?

Why are you afraid of such a communal future?

Why are you afraid of the removing artificial scarcity?

EDIT: Removed potentially inflammatory leader.

sunir3• 15 years ago

I don't understand your argument or what you are saying is wrong.

Rights are a legal limitation on the actions of others, not a physical limitation. They exist to limit people from doing what they otherwise "can" do to you in the physical world.

You have physical property rights so people cannot enter your home when you are at work and take your television. That is enforced through the law not the Fort Knox security that you might have.

If you have travelled to countries without rule of law you will understand what it means in practice when this right is not strong. Fences, security guards, and metal cages inside your house in every middle class home.

khafra• 15 years ago

> If I write something, I control what is done with it.

You're a good writer, both in the technical and moral sense; and I respect your experience, ability, and goals. However, there is no creation ex nihilo. I can't remember who said this, so I use it without attribution: would the world of music be richer today if, in 1900, one could copyright a bassline?

baddox• 15 years ago

My opinion is that you cannot own or have any control over an integer. I don't care how much effort you put into "discovering" this number: go right ahead and sell that number on a CD if you so desire, but I beleive the buyer has just as much authority over that number as you do (none).

bediger• 15 years ago

Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work.

I'm certain this is just wrong, at least from a USA perspective. The first copyright in England was to control, that is, copyright is censorship.

In the USA historically copyright was a way to induce people to enlarge the public domain.

Giving "creative" people control has never really entered into it, in the USA. I'm given to understand this is different in continental Europoean cultures, but SOPA and PIPA are American, and based out of an English-speaking culture.

If you propose to add some kind of "moral right of control" to a "creative" work, you first need to define "creative work" so that I can tell a creative work from an un-creative work without referring to some authority, a list or an oracle or a government agent. Then we can discuss what moral rights might pertain, and how long they should last, etc etc. I personally think that the prevalence of independent invention invalidates any such "moral right of control", but you clearly believe otherwise.

FreakLegion• 15 years ago

I more or less agree with you. That said:

< When people propose that copyright be abolished...

This isn't what the linked piece is about. The author's arguments are mainstays like:

1) IP laws mostly protect big corporations, not creators, since these corporations effectively leverage their control of distribution against creators.

2) The measures these corporations take to protect their IP succeed only at annoying legitimate customers. Piracy has never been curbed by anti-piracy practices.

3) Et al.

Abolishing an exploitative industry that preys on copyright holders and abolishing copyright itself are two very different things.

sophacles• 15 years ago

Two things I would like to see addressed here:

1. Why is copyright so important if everyone can create well? Why scarcify something that without the protection would be worthless? If creation is humanity, why limit the act of creation to the first person to get there? We don't prevent people from climbing mountains just because someone else got there first. We don't stop runners from finishing races because someone else got first place. We don't stop fashion, because brands copy each other's styles all the time (trademark issues are related, but really different here... no one complains when Gap puts out a line similar to say Tommy Hilfiger, as long as they claim it is Gap). In fact a large number of creative works are merely derivative of other works, even "brilliant new" ones -- any limit on the creation process in this regard can be seen as artificially scarcifying something.

2. Why respond to an article about why the current copyright situation is broken and needs change with a long rant that defends the need for copyright, and uses language seemingly arguing against some strawman position of "abolish copyright" that is not present in the original article.

prodigal_erik3• 15 years ago

There's a level of indirection that we should think about very clearly. We aren't talking about control over the first or any other copy of a work of art, but rather control over people who want to use them. Control over people with their own free will can never be better than a necessary evil, so we as a society should agree on the bare minimum that would satisfy those goals we share.

gaulinmp• 15 years ago

This is a fine and very important point that has gotten too little coverage. It seems all the arguments here come down to a philosophical argument about how much control over others (the consumers) should we, as a society, agree to exert?

enduser• 15 years ago

"To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction" - Bhagavad Gita

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

Quite. CDs filled an important need at the time they came on the market - quality music reproduction that did not degrade with repeated use like vinyl or tape does. Sure, digital delivery would have been nice, but back then modems ran at about 1200bps and mp3 encoding was a gleam in the eye of someone at the Fraunhofer Institute.

Two wrongs don't make a right; saying the service isn't good enough is a cheap excuse. Pirates should articulate what they do pay for, not what (they say) they would pay for. Talk is cheap, distribution and marketing do have costs associated with them.

Edit: my point is to defend the basic idea of copyright and content distribution as an economic good, rather to support any particular distribution model or SOPA itself. Coming from a film background, it costs a great deal of money to bring a high-quality film to the screen, and to reliably recoup that investment, distributors usually spend 50% of the film's budget on marketing. Films are sort of like startups insofar as each one is a little self-contained business, and the same is true of alnums, TV shows etc., but discussion of the economics from the content production side is often sorely lacking in debates about piracy.

loup-vaillant3• 15 years ago

You might want to separate the right to copy and the obligation to give attribution. I know of no one who would support the abolition of mandatory attribution. But abolishing the restrictions on copying itself doesn't seem so unreasonable once I say "but you would still have to name the original author!".

To me, a reasonable system would be to authorize everything, provided you give proper attribution. You can copy, but name the author. You can parody or plagiarize, but you have to say so. That way, we keep a right to recognition, at nearly zero cost to society. I think this is both morally acceptable, and economically feasible.

wwwtyro4• 15 years ago

I'll probably be sent to the back of the pack for this, but in light of the "End Piracy, Not Liberty" meme bouncing around, I'd like to offer an alternative viewpoint and some rationale for it:

Don't End "Piracy" or Liberty:

I believe that when you buy your hard drive, you own it. I believe that the bits on your hard drive are yours to set however you please. I believe that if someone else tells you how to set those bits so that you can run them through a video decoder to watch the latest Batman movie that neither they nor you have done anything that can be responded to with force, because your actions (communication and altering your own property) have been nonviolent. I believe that if someone tries to throw you in jail for setting those bits or telling someone else about the bits, they are the ones that are being unethical, because they are using aggressive force.

It's probably true that the jobs and/or income of people in the entertainment industry may be at risk because of this. The problem, in my opinion, does not stem from the act of copying, but rather from a business model that depends on aggressive force. It strikes me as incredibly narrow-minded to stick to this foundering and unethical business model when there are an infinite number of ethical business models to try. They can do literally anything (anything!) that does not involve violence.

chj2• 15 years ago

A better title "Why I'm a Thief".

You can always choose not to buy it or watch it if you dislike it. Is it something like air that you really can't live without? People tend to be greedy. No matter the big guys or the little guys. Just the same. People sucks.

DanielStraight• 15 years ago

The author claims that he hates the music industry and won't miss them, yet he admits he's willing to break the law to get their products. Consider the absurdity of this juxtaposition.

Modern popular music is properly considered the product of both the artists and the industry. Someone mentioned Rihanna. Do you think you would have any idea who Rihanna is without the music industry? Would her music sound at all the same with the music industry's backing (funds to pay for studio use and hire studio musicians)? If you don't like modern popular music fine, but if you don't like it, why are you pirating it?

Given that perspective, when you download music, you are enjoying both the labor of the artist and the record company. If you don't like the price they're charging to enjoy their services, that does not give you the right to simply not pay. (We can debate elsewhere whether you already have the right to not pay, but you certainly don't get that right simply because you don't like the price.)

Someone asked for a better analogy. Sneaking into a movie theater and standing (so you aren't taking up a seat) in the back is an analogous situation. You are enjoying the services of the movie theater (which you consider worth breaking the law to get access to) without paying their asking price.

Someone reminded us that copying isn't stealing. Well it isn't sharing either. Two children playing with two toys isn't sharing. Two children taking turns with one toy is sharing.

To return to the most important point, the author's argument can be summed up and generalized as, "If you don't like the cost/benefit ratio of a service, you have the right to take it for free as long as no one is directly hurt in the process."

Frankly, I think people like that should be stopped, which as Ed pointed out, almost makes me feel like a SOPA supporter.

scotty793• 15 years ago

> The author claims that he hates the music industry and won't miss them, yet he admits he's willing to break the law to get their products.

He's not breaking "the law". His breaking some law. You surely broke some law in your life? You can't be sure that you didn't. You just try not to inflict harm on other people and get by.

"Their products" spam everything everywhere. Their billboards litter public space. Their music litters radio waves. Their silly cliches litter minds.

If you dangle a carrot in front of peoples faces you shouldn't complain that someone will eventually eat it without paying you a goddamn thing. Especially if he can do that without you even noticing.

I think if piracy stops Hollywood from shoving their crap in everyone's faces it will be a good thing.

ravloony• 15 years ago

I'm not going to set my own behaviour up as an example here, which is something that I think invalidates the OP's point, at least partially, and certainly obscures it, but I have a couple of points:

- It is unreasonable on the whole to expect people to refrain from piracy when it's just so easy. It's kind of like putting candy in front of a child and not expecting him to eat it, compounded by the fact that there is at least the illusion of anonymity on the internet. - It is unreasonable to expect artists to use the internet by themselves to distribute their content, although some do. Most of them are probably not that technically inclined. There needs to be someone there to take that pain away from them. - It is just that people who create content get paid for doing so.

So it's really a market problem. We need a system that allows people to just download as easily as pirating, but allows the content creators to live off their creation. If the traditional content distributors (who are not the creators) cannot supply a service which does this, then I cannot see why they should be pitied.

I think something along the lines of Deezer et al is ok : a service that would allow you to consume music, no questions asked. The problem is that deezer is getting all its content from the distributors, so in effect there is a double middle man. But a subscription-based "deezer" which paid artists directly according to how much their tracks were listened to would work, IMHO. I believe such services already exist, in fact.

Also, you'd only need the big distributors to realize this, and build their own versions, and suddenly there's a proper market for tunes, films, etc. These new distributors would each have a catalogue of films and music on download, but they could also open the catalogue to cinemas, tv channels and so on. The only thing they couldn't do is restrict access, under pain of piracy.

I'm just hypothesising here, but as far as I can see the content distributors are being the artisans of their own downfall by not doing this themselves.

billpatrianakos6• 15 years ago

How about "how I just don't want to pay While trying to play it off like I have some moral/political agenda".

This post hurts the pro-copyright people, anti-copyright people, and all people with brains.

Edit: I think I was too harsh with that last line. But my point still stands that this article is doing more harm than good. There are a lot of people who write these rants but do it for the wrong reasons and try to play it off like they're some sort of freedom fighter.

marshray3• 15 years ago

Are there some examples from the article that support this idea that primarily "he just doesn't want to pay"?

hugh4life• 15 years ago

I used to be a huge pirate but I'm not anymore... except for one thing and that's live streaming of cable television. Quite honestly, I wish everyone pirated cable television until it is offered a la carte. The way these media companies stuff packages down consumers throats is just evil.

peterhajas• 15 years ago

This attitude is really obnoxious. It's not yours. You don't get to pick. You can't arbitrarily point at something and dislike how they distribute it, and instead steal it. That's not justification for your actions.

Furthermore, the title and the picture frame this as "cool" or "fun" or "free". It's more like leeching off of another's work, and disregarding their right to do with it what they please.

falling• 15 years ago

Yes, you are a pirate because you want cheap music.

There are nowadays plenty of ways to get music with much less hassle than TPB, at reasonable prices, with good audio quality and no DRM, often even directly from minor labels’ websites.

If you don't use any them it's because you don't want to pay and just that.

(Movies are still a problem, but the author is focusing on music here, which is largely resolved)

electic• 15 years ago

It really is true. Entertainment seems to be one of the few products you can buy that will actually attack you back. Seems very reminiscent of tobacco products.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

This entire debate has been wrong footed from day 1, "piracy" is and always has been a misnomer and an aggressive attempt to frame the debate.

Sharing, lending, and broadcasting have been a core part of the dissemination of creative works for centuries. Libraries. Personal borrowing. Museums. Broadcast TV and radio. For the entirety of the modern age it has been the norm for the average individual "consuming" a creative work to do so without directly purchasing a licensed copy. Somehow creative industries survived.

Today the limits to copying are very different and thus unfamiliar if not frightening for some. Yet creative industries have not died and are not dying, despite persistent attempts to fight against modern technology at every stage (resisting digital distribution, creating experiences that are typically wholly inferior to the "piracy" experience). Imagine if literature, music, etc. never embraced libraries, radio, or television. Imagine if book lending was made illegal.

There are ways to embrace sharing and dissemination of IP without direct payment for every consumed copy while still maintaining profitability. The old limits are dead. Portraying all manner of sharing of creative works as "intellectual property theft" is frankly ridiculous. The idea that the line between borrowing a book from a library (or reading a book within the library) and borrowing a digital copy of a movie from a friend (or even a stranger) is a line between acceptable behavior and theft is an idea born of prejudice and provincialism. We need to get over such old prejudices and begin to form new models and new boundaries.

shousper• 15 years ago

I still don't see anyone offering a viable solution..

There are a lot of variables that come into play for a generic copyright or IP law that encompasses all creative works. The first of which should probably be scope.

Physical and non-physical creations; a painting or a jpg; a photo of a painting in jpg format; a photo of a photo of a painting in jpg format.

The digital work - the internet - has changed the world forever and we're not going back. Some form of "SOPA" or "PIPA" is inevitable.

The question is simple: what are you going to do about it?

Why I'm a Pirate

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